'Photogrammetry' brings realism to detective game scenery

Mystery game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is offering
up impressively photorealistic churches, rocks and statues thanks a
technique called photogrammetry.

The game follows the story of a detective with supernatural
abilities investigating the kidnapping of a young boy. One of the
aspects the development team, The Astronauts, is
concerned about is immersion -- your ability to sink into the game
world -- and all the little unconscious cues which might mess that
up.

In terms of game assets like churches and boulders those little
cues come in the form of surface textures which, when tiled to
cover an area, result in visual oddities like visible joins or an
unnatural uniformity.

As developer Andrzej Poznanski puts it: "Even if on the
unconscious level, your brain points out to you all those perfectly
tiling textures, all those evenly worn-out surfaces, those stains
placed in all the wrong places -- and whispers in your ear:
LOL!"

Photogrammetry
is the science of making measurements from photographs and is the
team's way of bringing realistic objects into the game. It involves
taking multiple overlapping photographs which can then be processed
in order to create models.

As Poznanski explains: "We get up, go out there and shoot
photos, lots of photos. And then some. Afterwards, a specialised
software -- we are using Photoscan from Agisoft -- looks
at these photos, and stares at them until it can finally match
every discernible detail from one photo to same exact feature in
other photos taken from different angles.

"This results in a cloud of points in 3D space, representing
real world object. From there, the software connects the dots to
create a 3D model, and projects pixels from photographs to create a
texture."

The objects that this generates are impressive, however they
contain masses of data which would mean you'd struggle to include
more than one in the game and have it still be playable.
Compression trickery and a range of optimisation techniques are how
The Astronauts are dealing with the issue.

The game isn't going for full photorealism, however. Probably
just as well as you'd somehow have to build the entire thing in
real life then stitch it together and then worry about the Uncanny
Valley effect for the rest of time.

No, the idea is that using these assets means you'll just stop
having that constant unconscious reminder that you're in a game and
that the textures are just repeating patterns -- "We went
through all the hard work on these assets so that you
can stop seeing assets and start seeing the
world."

The results the team has shown off so far are impressive, what
will be interesting is whether their use in the game has the
intended effect or whether we're so used to the strangeness of
existing game objects that a more natural approach will feel
weird.